Blog

Page 6197

Jun 9, 2021

Scientists invent AI that creates COVID vaccine candidates within seconds

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

A team at the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California have created something that could turn the tide in how fast vaccines come into existence.

They created an AI framework that can significantly speed-up the analysis of COVID vaccine candidates and also find the best preventative medical therapies. This is at a time when more and more COVID mutations are emerging, bringing existing vaccine efficiencies into question.

Virologists are concerned that the mutations will evolve past the first vaccines. The UK even set up a genomic consortium to look solely at where these mutations are cropping up. In the global picture, while some poorer countries wait for access to the vaccine, they become sitting ducks for highly infectious mutations.

Jun 9, 2021

Green Light to Grow

Posted by in categories: food, sustainability

Nowadays, over half of the seafood we enjoy is farm-raised rather than caught in the open. A technique recently developed by Japanese scientists has the potential to fundamentally change yields for farmed fish. And the secret is in the lighting…

Jun 9, 2021

Dr. Vicki Fishlock — Amboseli Trust for Elephants — Conservation And Welfare Of Africas Elephants

Posted by in category: futurism

50+ Year Study Of The Life Cycle, Conservation And Welfare Of Africa’s Elephants — Dr. Vicki Fishlock, Ph.D., Resident Scientist, Amboseli Trust for Elephants.


Dr. Vicki Fishlock Ph.D. is a Resident Scientist, at The Amboseli Trust for Elephants (https://www.elephanttrust.org/), an organization that aims to ensure the long-term conservation and welfare of Africa’s elephants in the context of human needs and pressures, through scientific research, training, community outreach, public awareness and advocacy, and which is involved in the longest-running study of wild elephants in the world.

Continue reading “Dr. Vicki Fishlock — Amboseli Trust for Elephants — Conservation And Welfare Of Africas Elephants” »

Jun 9, 2021

Hackers can mess with HTTPS connections

Posted by in categories: encryption, security

Typically abbreviated as TLS, Transport Layer Security uses strong encryption to prove that an end user is connected to an authentic server belonging to a specific service (such as Google or Bank of America) and not an impostor masquerading as that service. TLS also encrypts data as it travels between an end user and a server to ensure that people who can monitor the connection can’t read or tamper with the contents. With millions of servers relying on it, TLS is a cornerstone of online security.

In a research paper published on Wednesday, Brinkmann and seven other researchers investigated the feasibility of using what they call cross-protocol attacks to bypass TLS protections. The technique involves an MitM attacker redirecting cross-origin HTTP requests to servers that communicate over SMTP, IMAP, POP3, or FTP, or another communication protocol.

The main components of the attack are the client application used by the targeted end user, denoted as C; the server the target intended to visit, denoted as Sint; and the substitute server, a machine that connects using SMTP, FTP, or another protocol that’s different from the one serverint uses but with the same domain listed in its TLS certificate.

Jun 9, 2021

MIT Engineers Have Discovered a Completely New Way of Generating Electricity

Posted by in categories: nanotechnology, particle physics

MIT engineers have discovered a way to generate electricity using tiny carbon particles that can create an electric current simply by interacting with an organic solvent in which they’re floating. The particles are made from crushed carbon nanotubes (blue) coated with a Teflon-like polymer (green). Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT. Based on a figure courtesy of the researchers.

A new material made from carbon nanotubes can generate electricity by scavenging energy from its environment.

MIT engineers have discovered a new way of generating electricity using tiny carbon particles that can create a current simply by interacting with liquid surrounding them.

Jun 9, 2021

After 60 years, scientists are still trying to crack a mysterious serotonin-autism link

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

The high levels of serotonin seen in the blood of some autistic people have confounded scientists for more than half a century. Despite so little progress, some researchers refuse to give up.

Jun 9, 2021

DNA Jumps Between Animal Species. No One Knows How Often

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, evolution

Laurie Graham, a molecular biologist at Queen’s University in Ontario and lead author on the paper, knows she’s making a bold claim in arguing for the direct transfer of a gene from one fish to another. That kind of horizontal DNA movement once wasn’t imagined to happen in any animals, let alone vertebrates. Still, the more she and her colleagues study the smelt, the clearer the evidence becomes.

Nor are the smelt unique. Recent studies of a range of animals — other fish, reptiles, birds and mammals — point to a similar conclusion: The lateral inheritance of DNA, once thought to be exclusive to microbes, occurs on branches throughout the tree of life.

Sarah Schaack, an evolutionary genomicist at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, believes these cases of horizontal transfer still have “a pretty big wow factor” even among scientists, “because the conventional wisdom for so long was that it was less likely or impossible in eukaryotes.” But the smelt discovery and other recent examples all point to horizontal transfers playing an influential role in evolution.

Jun 9, 2021

Age Resetting Genes Going to Human Studies in Two Years

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, genetics, neuroscience

David Sinclair is a geneticist at Harvard and author of Lifespan.

Nature – Reversal of biological clock restores vision in old mice

Continue reading “Age Resetting Genes Going to Human Studies in Two Years” »

Jun 9, 2021

The Forever Virus

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

A strategy for the long fight against COVID-19.


Global herd immunity is now unreachable. How should governments’ strategy in the fight against COVID-19 change in response?

Jun 9, 2021

South African woman gives birth to 10 babies in possible world record

Posted by in category: futurism

Gosiame Thamara Sithole, 37, was astonished by decuplets after scans only showed eight in the womb.